Austin residents have historically lacked access to financial resources like banks. But the opening of a PNC Bank branch, along with a new grocery store, is helping to change that.
It’s PNC Bank’s first brick-and-mortar location in Chicago since opening one in Hyde Park seven years ago.
The Pittsburgh-based bank has 117 branches in the Chicago area, according to Carlos Abad, PNC’s senior vice president of retail banking for Chicago and Wisconsin. It also runs mobile branches, which stop at several locations throughout the South and West sides and provide financial education.
According to data from the Chicago Health Atlas, 21.9% of adults in Austin reported that no one in their household held a checking or savings account in 2023 and 2024.
Malcolm Crawford, executive director of the Austin African American Business Network Association, said the opening of PNC Bank’s branch and its neighbor Forty Acres Fresh Market will help steer money back into Austin, as many residents often travel to Oak Park to shop and bank.
“We did not have access,” he said. “People had to leave our community. … That doesn’t happen in too many areas on a commercial business district, where you don’t have access to a bank.”
The seeds for the Austin’s grocery store were planted when owner Liz Abunaw couldn’t find necessities in the area.
“The origin story of [Forty Acres Fresh Market] happened because I wound up in the neighborhood unexpectedly and couldn’t find a bank, a grocery store and a CVS along a major commercial corridor to do just basic transactions — basic business things that I needed to do,” Abunaw said.
Forty Acres Fresh Market will host a joint grand opening ceremony with PNC Bank, located next door, on Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Visitors will get to enjoy complimentary snacks from Forty Acres, a Chicago Bears photo booth and DJ.
Forty Acres and PNC, at 5713-17 W. Chicago Ave., are part of Austin’s Soul City Corridor.
The corridor — an area of Chicago Avenue between Austin Boulevard and Cicero Avenue — was designated as a state cultural district earlier this year with the goal of promoting Black culture and business development.
Residents in Austin experience some of the lowest levels of food access in the city, a 2023 Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis found. Areas of Chicago with higher percentages of Black residents — typically the South and West sides — tend to have less access to grocery stores, particularly full-service stores which offer healthy, diverse options, according to the analysis.
Abunaw, who ran Forty Acres since 2017 as a pop-up market and grocery delivery service, said a bank was the perfect business to occupy the space next door because of the “constant foot traffic” it provides.
“If I got all my wishes, I would want that tenant to be a complementary business,” she said. “And the best complementary business to a grocery store is a bank.”
While many banking services can be done online, there’s still a high demand for physical bank branches for consumers, such as older adults, lower-income residents and people living with disabilities, according to Fed Communities, a collaboration among the 12 Federal Reserve Banks. People also need access to digital devices and the internet to use online banking services, which can be hard to access for low-income residents.
“We’ve had clients from other locations saying, ‘Thank goodness you’re here. Traffic in Chicago was difficult for me to navigate. This is so much closer. It’s so much easier,’” Abad said. “So we’re looking forward to actually being part of the revitalization, [with] financial education and … to improve the community.”
Crawford said community members have worked hard to build Soul City Corridor, and the bank and grocery store are key aspects of that.
“[We’re] in the midst of a real renaissance that [we] will see the dividends on in just a little while,” he said.